Job openings on the Visual Studio Debugger Dev Team

I have been a developer for the Visual Studio debugger for five and a half years now. We currently have two open positions, so I decided to post an advertisement.

If you think being a developer on the Visual Studio debugger would be a cool job, send your resume to vcsjobs@microsoft.com.

Why I love working on the debugger:

Get to work on a tool that helps so many: the debugger has always been one of the best parts of Visual Studio, and I don’t think I am alone in thinking this. Visual Studio is a very popular product. So the work I do helps many developers across the world get their job done.

I am not just a developer, I am customer too: very few developers get to be in the target audience for the product you are working on. With the debugger, I know my customers because I am one of my customers. I spend hours every day using my debugger to debug itself.

Debugger implementations are cool: For instance, how do you set breakpoints in compiled/jit-compiled code? Since you don’t have an interpreter, how do you tell the processor to stop on a given instruction? Come learn how.

Good opportunity to learn technologies: The Visual Studio debugger is a big code base that supports lots of scenarios. Off the top of my head, I have needed to learn about: DCOM, Windows security and authentication, Scripting, SQL, ASP.NET, HTTP, the CLR, OS exception dispatch, and a huge slew of Win32 APIs that I otherwise would never have learned about.

It’s low level: I was a computer engineer in college and I really liked computer architecture, but I realized that software was where I wanted to be. The debugger was a good match for me because it is one of those jobs where you get to think about hardware without actually working on hardware.

I just want to say that the Visual Studio debugger is quite awesome. I have used it for many years, and I am still learning new things that help me figure out bugs. I took how good it was for granted until the past year when I began developing on Linux and debugging with GNU GDB. I hope you find some great developers for it to continue the great work!